


A Promise Kept

by roguefaerie (samidha)



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Boston Will Not Save You, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Descent into Madness, F/M, First Person POV Challenge, Ghost of Miranda Barlow, Ghosts, M/M, Madness, Miranda Barlow Appreciation, Multi, POV First Person, after the death, by Flint
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-27
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-10-17 14:58:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17562659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samidha/pseuds/roguefaerie
Summary: Miranda keeps her promises to Thomas and also, in a way, to James.





	A Promise Kept

**Author's Note:**

> I know I'm posting a lot, but I need a distraction from some stuff going on, so bear with me.

It was not until I had lost my mortal life that I began to understand. The way that James had always tried to warn me, for he had learned, that Boston would not save us. Still, he had honored my wishes until the very end.

Now I stood, always just slightly out of view, in my own haze created by the energy of my death. I watched his descent into madness. I watched the way that the love that had been mutually kept between the three of us had become so centered on me after the loss of Thomas that in my death it was as if losing everything all over again. It made perfect, twisted sense. And I could see all of it. I could see all of the back and forth that had been, and I could see those things that were coming forth.

I could see the madness, and in his dreams and visions of me I tried my best to calm the waters of his mind. His internal world.

Forever he asked why and I tried to answer, failing, until the one thing that I felt I could say in honesty, that I finally came up with, about all the things that I had been to him. For I also had a laser focus now, upon the one of us still standing in battle.

A battle some understood, others not.

Boston had not saved us, and perhaps the only thing for it would be that James would save himself. But at times I stood and took his hand, when it was quiet and many things were still. When the sea was like glass and when the pirates slept but James still stirred, fitfully and feverish.

I might knock something from the wall, or clatter just enough against the door of his cabin. He did not always know when it was me. It was never easy living something of a half-life, concentrating on James as I was. Long ago I had made a promise to Thomas, and over the years the promises to each other grew in number and changed. To care for James would be to fulfill a promise. Perhaps several at once.

Still, slowly, he was unraveling, and it was the promises he had made to Thomas about me that helped this develop into what it would become.

There was no guilt here, only knowledge. And so I could see it in the way it might unfold, and the mainy different parallels which could develop instead. I tried to remain impartial. It was not my life, anymore, and what remained was his own life. And yet there was love, deep and abiding and as real and true as the sea. And so impartiality was impossible. I would stand beside him and lend my knowledge and my love until they were no longer needed. If I would become a feature of his madness, perhaps that too had begun long ago, as ongoing unmet needs often do.


End file.
